Tina Kakadelis
Behind every single actor on screen is a make-up and special effects artist who plays a major role in bringing a character to life. In the case of the upcoming Hulu dust bowl horror film, Hold Your Breath, the person responsible for creating the visual look for the stars of the movie is Jennifer “JQ” Quinteros. Hold Your Breath marks Sarah Paulson’s return to genre fare with a psychological thriller set in 1930s Oklahoma. Margaret (Paulson) lives in a secluded farm home with her two daughters (Amiah Miller & Alona Jane Robbins). After reading the ghost story of The Grey Man and the sudden appearance of a strange man (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), the tight knit family must determine what’s real and what’s just a figment of their imagination.
JQ sat down with Film Obsessive’s News Editor Tina Kakadelis to discuss her career, the subtleties of make-up, and the power she found working with Sarah Paulson and an all-queer, all-female team on Hold Your Breath. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Hey, JQ, how are you doing? How are you doing this morning?
JQ Quinteros: I worked a split, so I’m a little bit tired. I’m like, oh, man, I’m showing up puffy.
It’s all good! I wanted to start with how you found your way into makeup and special effect work.
When you talk to a lot of special effects kids, I like to call us kids, you’ll find that a lot of them have loved monsters and been trying to create monsters since they were kids. I was not that at all. I was studying to be a wildlife veterinarian. That was my path. I was doing everything right, I was in all the right programs, I was working at a clinic, and I was miserable.
I have a really great best friend that I’ve known since I was a kid, Josh. He’s my best friend in the whole world and he was like, you’ve always loved makeup and lighting for theater, why don’t you just study what you love? Why don’t you get into makeup or get into lighting design? And I was like, wow. So, I was going to be a doctor and start at six figures and you want me to be an artist?!
I shadowed my best friend for a day in the design department and I was hooked. At the time, I had been stalking a makeup school in Los Angeles just because I liked their students’ work. I went on winter break on my last year of college, visited all the schools, and fell in love with the school that I had been following. I applied to it, got in, and the rest was history. From that moment on, like my whole world became lighting, makeup and film. And so I graduated with a degree in lighting just to help me understand makeup.
I wish I understood lighting like that. I had a similar path, though. I was in hospitality school, doing hotel work, and I was like, this is awful.
Oh, my God. I used to watch shows on that. How to train butlers, stuff like that. That’s really fascinating, though. That’s pretty cool.
I ended up taking film classes and a lighting class. To this day, I still don’t understand lighting to save my life.
I think if I hadn’t fallen in love with it, I wouldn’t have cared to understand the science of it. I don’t necessarily keep up to date with the technology of lighting, only bare minimum what’s going to affect me. When it comes to lighting and color science, it’s what made me be a more holistic artist for other department heads. The first person I want to know about when I get hired on a job or when I’m up for a job is who’s the DP? The second thing I want to know is who’s the gaffer. What’s the look of the show? Have you chosen a LUT? Do you have a color palette you’re going with? We go from there. That way, I’m not trying to tweak things on set and I’m not wasting time because time is money.
Sometimes you get a beautiful makeup to set and it looks completely wrong. It happens to the best of us especially if you don’t know the camera. Had it not been for my best friend telling me that art is real that I can have a real job in art, I wouldn’t have understood.
Thank goodness for them! As someone who never wears makeup at all, I think special effects is easier to wrap my head around because I can see the blood coming out of a wound or a monster. Can you talk about the transformative power that even just simple, basic makeup creates a character for the actors and for the film?
Absolutely. Makeup can change everything. Even just the slightest stroke of an eyeliner, the reshaping of an eyebrow, putting highlight and shadow on to the face. I don’t mean full contour and highlight, but it’s the subtleties in makeup that actually create characters. That is why some of the most beautiful work in the world by some of the most talented makeup artists, people have no idea about. They don’t even register it. The artist used the person’s natural features and manipulated them. Sometimes, that’s a manipulation to try to create a more pleasing aesthetic or it’s a manipulation to distort a face. We all have a roadmap and we all have an equation to our face.
I don’t wear makeup either. The last thing I want to do when I’m doing it on everybody else all day is do it on myself (laughs). I understand the power of makeup. Like today, I’m coming in a little bit puffy, I’m very tired, I got home at 2 a.m., right? Or if you were going into a business meeting and wanted people to see bright and sunny you. Maybe your skin didn’t look bright and sunny, maybe you’re having a little bit of discoloration. Maybe you’re even recovering from being sick. If you just place strategic colors on the face in very small spots, you’ll change everything about the way someone sees you.
Taking away darkness under eyes doesn’t mean full concealer and foundation. It just means I’m painting pink on the blue. Sometimes it means I’m putting orange on the blue and green and yellow. All those tiny little tweaks slowly make the brain connect the dots. As animals, read signs like, if your face is flushed and your skin is smooth, you’re fertile. Your brain is like, whoa, pumping blood fertile. Let’s mate, let’s go (laughs). Those are the small cues that you can bring into a makeup. If you have somebody who is stunning, but they’re really fair. You can see their veins through their fair skin and they don’t have any pink in their cheeks. If you simply smooth out a complexion, maybe add a little rosiness in areas, suddenly that person is completely different to the eye. Suddenly, that person has something different to offer.
If you’re going to do special effects and understand slash and trash. It’s like, yeah, slit the throat, do the blood cannon, let’s go. But to me, if you’re going to be doing all that stuff, you better understand the subtleties of what it’s on or who it’s on or how it’s going to blend. How are you going to make the throat appliance? It’s huge, wraps around the neck, goes onto the chest, and disappears into the body. You’re going to create all those subtle color cues that you have on your edges and bring them down on to the piece. If you don’t understand that when it comes to regular beauty, if you can’t understand what eyeliner does to change in eye shape, how are you understanding special effects? How are you absolutely distorting the face, creating bone structures, creating peaks and valleys, highlights and shadows? How are you doing all of that if you don’t understand the basics?
Back in the day when male effects artists ruled the world, and women were almost never involved, what would happen is they’d do a full effects makeup and they’d go to a woman in the trailer, whether or not they know who that woman was or what she’s capable of. They’d be like, hey, can you can put the eyeliner on? What?! That’s a huge pet peeve of mine. When I train and mentor young female makeup artists, I say this to women especially because I don’t want them to be the one in the trailer being pulled to the effects makeup to do the eyeliner. What I want is for them to understand all the small things that make us look normal or alive, young or old are also going to go into a special effects makeup depending on if it’s human or not.
Don’t you want to be the person who does that whole makeup? Don’t you want to be capable of applying eleven prosthetics on the face and then doing the beauty makeup on top? Think about Bombshell. If I were on Bombshell and I just recreated a human likeness makeup and I had to give somebody else the small things…oh, that would kill me.
To bring it back to somebody who doesn’t wear makeup, the reason that I’m a good department head and the reason that I can create cool things is because I respect everything from an eyebrow hair to a full on creature suit. I respect every single aspect of makeup and it becomes this holistic thing and your team can feel that too. It’s all the small things that make up the majority of our job.
Your story about the men and the women in special effects leads me to my question about Hold Your Breath. I got to see it the premiere at TIFF which was very fun.
Amazing! I haven’t even seen it. I’m waiting for the LA premiere.
It’s a bit of a spoiler, I guess, but the part that has stuck the most was the sewing scene where Sarah Paulson’s character absentmindedly sews a piece of thread through her palm.
That is a subtle makeup. A very intricate prosthetic, but it’s a very subtle makeup. It only works because of the way we executed it.
I mean it’s been like a week since I watched the movie and I just keep thinking about the thread and Sarah Paulson’s hand! I read that there was an entirely female and queer creative team working with Sarah. Can you talk a little bit about that experience and the collaboration that comes with that?
Totally. First and foremost, let me say that was by chance. Sarah’s crew was all female and queer because the producers handpicked everybody that they were working with. They don’t know I’m gay when I’m going in. It was the producers who I had worked with before who said, we’d really love to throw your name and we’d really love for you to department head this. When they said that it was Sarah who is the lead, I was low key like, yes, yes, yes. Queer female actor as a lead, queer female department head. I love the dynamic already.
As pre-production happened, I started to realize her assistant, her body coach, her dialect coach, and her personal hairstylist, Michelle [Ceglia], who I absolutely fell in love with, she’s so talented. It just happened to be like the women that were around Sarah, all of us, myself included, ended up being queer. I called her personal hairstylist to introduce myself and say that I understand she’s working with wigs, ask how I can respect her wigs and her laces, and let her know — here’s what I’m planning on our makeups (Just to try to troubleshoot and show respect to the hair and the wig), when she found out that I was queer, she was like, oh, my God.
It’s good to have a full queer team. What was really special about that was a an immediate understanding, right? We do live in a different world as queer, nonbinary, trans people because we are not fully accepted by the entire world. We all know that. Some of us float about it differently. Sarah floats about it very much in her power. She doesn’t feel the need to talk about it. She doesn’t feel the need to bond with you because of it. She’s there because she’s Sarah. You could tell that that’s how she expects others to show up. I showed up there because I’m JQ. We just so happened to have this thing in common. What that did for me personally, selfishly was that helped me create a bond faster with these women.
It also felt really amazing that the creative team for the most part from Searchlight, the producers from, the writing standpoint, of course director Karrie Crouse, everybody. It was so female dominant. It was really magical not only to have females but usually like you’re the only queer kid in the room which is a very lonely place sometimes. You also don’t just want to be hired on queer things and just do queer things, which is also a very lonely place. I think we all understood that loneliness.
When it came to working with Sarah, you could tell she’s seen everything that women have experienced when it comes to the industry and not being listened to. If a man speaks up, it’s whatever he says, but if a woman speaks up, it’s too much. Working with all queer women brought this alpha power to the mix. It was awesome because I am definitely an alpha. I call myself a rare alpha because I don’t get weird when others are around. I’m like, yes, my pack, my team, here we are.
I felt like that was the same vibe when it came to working on Hold Your Breath. I felt like we had a group of really powerful women who happened to be queer, so we ebbed and flowed quite nicely. When there was an issue, it was brought head on. It was not danced around. If somebody felt like they weren’t being heard, they said it. It just created this atmosphere of instant respect.
Sarah’s in her power. She doesn’t have to talk about being queer, so that’s not how we bonded. But man, does it feel good to walk into that trailer every morning, both of us knowing who we are and being like, good morning, rainbow flags waving. So it’s a great group of strong, powerful queer women.
It’s also really cool that when other people come on set, they think I’m just the beauty department head. Suddenly, they see me pull out a body and they’re like, who made that? Me! I think the acknowledgment, acceptance, and the respect came instantly from the queer women. It was from others that it was just there were the normal stereotypes. You know, like, where’s the man doing the special effects makeups that are so cool on this? Everybody’s always surprised when a woman walks in and starts killing somebody.
It is kind of fun to subvert expectations a little bit. I mean, as annoying as it is, it is kind of fun sometimes.
I agree with you 110%. It happened to me on set yesterday. We beat up a dude, cartel got to him. You know, like zip tied in a shower. Again, everybody was like, who did the makeup? He looks great. He looks great. They all looked past me. They’re looking for the dude and immediately, the female director is like, she did the makeup. I love that too, but I hate that it exists. If it’s if it exists, I might as well feel good about it when it happens like that.
I was reading an interview you did with the LA Times about Mystique in the X-Men movies and how it took a year to find that blue. How do you know when you find the blue? I guess it’s more of a metaphorical question. In Hold Your Breath, how did you know you had enough dust? When do you know that a look is ready?
That is part of the magic of what makes something work or not. It also has to do with the subtleties, like a shift of a blue tone. I wasn’t a part of that process for Mystique, that was the department head Lufeng Qu who would be amazing to ask about that as well. When it comes to like fleshing out, all puns intended, a character, you know, Sarah is a great example. That palm gag, for instance, the Director of Photography, Zoë [White], was going to be so close to the hand. She wanted intimacy. That’s how she wanted to tell the story. I hope that’s how it turned out.
If you’re going to see anything close up, the brain is going to do everything to see the things that aren’t real. When you’re putting a palm prosthetic on, it looks fake until you paint and paint and paint. If you paint too much, then it looks fake again. You go from no paint looking like a prosthetic to full paint looking like a prosthetic. There’s this beautiful in-between where you’re layering and you’re going back and forth with colors. All of a sudden, it’s almost like a sudden synapse pops off in your brain and it goes, there it is, that looks real. Then you then have to ask a person who’s out of your reality and go, does this look real?
For things like Mystique’s blue, if she’s too dark, she’s not going to look like the comic book character. If she’s too light, she’s going to look cartoonish, right? If she’s too much of a purple blue, she’ll look too indigo. There’s there’s so many subtleties in color and textures that, as a makeup artist, the only way you learn to make something really real is by observing the real.
I’m looking at you through a Zoom screen right now and I’m watching your muscles move. How does Tina’s face move when she smiles? You find the sweet spot in the makeup when you question, is it there? Is that real? People will tell you because people’s brains are amazing. They’re fascinating. A lot of people have very different visual strengths. Some people will be like, that looks great. Other people will ask, do you see that little halo of an edge on the side? And you’re like, damn it, I do. You can always add, you can’t take away. When it comes to finding the sweet spot, it’s almost like a romance.
It sounds very scientific until it’s like, is this right? That’s what it sounds like.
Exactly, exactly. You can use all the science that you want to, but at the end of the day, we’re humans. A human is going to watch this, so what does the human think?
My last question for you, and I don’t exactly know how to phrase this, but what is your dream special effect? What is the thing that you would love to do that you haven’t gotten to do yet in terms of special effects or makeup?
I want to do a period war film. I love history and I kind of low key love the history of war. It helps me understand society and humans because war has been around since people have been around. When I say period piece war, most people think World War II, that would be awesome, but I’m thinking Braveheart. Gladiator. Movies like that. Those makeups would be the most amazing dream for me to department head and design. To be a part of designing and creating historic characters would be amazing. There’s a map, we know what they looked like and we know what happened. To recreate real life moments, that is what I love. That’s why I do regular and special effects because to me, characters are where it’s at. Characters are the ones that have the coolest things happen to them. That guy gets impaled over here, this person’s face is almost slashed off, this dude’s arm is blown off, another guy comes out of the mud and with injury.
It’d be so amazing to do Joan of Arc, that’d be a dream maker. I am definitely in love with Western European wars because it has everything to do with the Vikings, the Romans, all of them. There’s so many stories to tell. Of course, that’s true around the whole entire world, but man, you could go from a polar cap to a Mediterranean part of the world and back. All these types of people are meeting each other…Now I’m going to daydream all day about that!
I’ll cross my fingers for you that you get your war movie! Thank you for your time. This was such a fun little chat this morning. I’ve learned so much about makeup. Maybe I’ll go buy some today and try it out.
Absolutely do that! Thank you so much. Take care I hope you have a great rest of your day
